Saskatchewan’s Carol Daniels–writer, artist and musician–was Canada's first Aboriginal woman to anchor a national newscast. Raw and honest, her debut novel Bearskin Diary draws on her experience as a journalist and investigates what it means to find your voice and dare to speak up. With her debut, Daniels adds an important perspective to the Canadian literary landscape.

Born in Yellowknife, North­west Territories, Joan Crate’s first novel, Breathing Water, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Award and the Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her latest, Black Apple, is a dramatic and lyrical coming-of-age novel about a young Blackfoot girl who grows up in the residential school system on the Canadian prairies.

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm is a writer, spoken word artist, activist and the founder and Managing Editor of Kegedonce Press, one of only four Indigenous publishers in Canada. In The Stone Collection, she takes on complex and dangerous emotions, exploring the gamut of modern Anishinaabe experience. It is “generous, funny and dark,” and "doesn’t pull its emotional punches but it leavens its grim truths with bright humour and earthy lust,” says Eden Robinson.

After a vicious beating in a hotel room robbery in South Africa, however, James Bartleman, Ontario’s first Native lieutenant governor, was forced to come to terms with a deepening depression. In the end, Bartleman found new meaning in life when he became the Queen’s representative in Ontario and mobilized the public to support his initiatives championing books and education for Native children.

Humans do not all live equal lives; history
shows this and all sensible philosophers concede this truth. There are strong ones among us:
smart, rich, powerful, cunning.

The rest, the strong considers weak, and it seems a
given that most injustices perpetrated flow from the “strong” to those they
consider “weak”: religious intolerance, tribal and ethnic violence, “casual”
sexism, economic instability, Jim Crow. There is also within all humans a sense
of justice, that we are all of us entitled to freedom, the realization of our true
selves, and possibly, transcendence. It is in valuing these rights that the
oppressed lash out at their oppressors. One of the more readily available
and viable forms of righting societal wrongs is protest. From the protests of
the citizens of Uruk against Gilgamesh’s despotism to the Protestant
Reformation to the French Revolution to the British abolition of slavery, the most
important injustices have been met with the cries of the oppressed and the will
to act against the powers that be.

Consider this: More than half the nations on the face of
the earth were birthed out of protest movements; over eighty percent of
sub-Saharan Africa was, as were the U.S. and Scotland. Slaves against masters,
vassal states against suzerains, the weak wrestle against the strong and break their
yokes and the strong either repress or relent. It is simply the world we
live in.

Like Spartacus, the Martin Luther namesakes,
the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, and the Ekitis of the old
Oyo Kingdom in Western Nigeria, Micah White understands this tool and has
deployed it to great effect. He is credited as a co-founder of the Occupy Wall
Street movement, perhaps the most visible protest movement of the last
twenty-five years, and is by extension an uncle to similar uprisings elsewhere. This he has achieved alongside Kalle Lasn, a Vancouver
native, using the provocative Adbusters
magazine as a launching pad. White, however, considers the Occupy movement a
constructive failure, and in a talk given at the Southminster United Church,
Ottawa–and further explained in his new book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution—he explains why
he holds this opinion and the possible futures of protests in this era.

Here are a few things about Micah White. Thirty-four,
he is of mixed heritage–half African-American, half Caucasian– and he speaks in
a river’s rumble of a voice. He likes to keep his hair–which is more a young
lion’s mane–together using a bandanna. He has been an activist since he was
thirteen and in public schools, once founding an atheists’ club and eventually
landing on an episode of “Politically Incorrect.”[1]
For him the visual imagery of Adbusters,
combined with its rich symbolism and creativity, was what drew him to the
magazine, and eventually a memo he sent out became the blueprint of the Occupy
Wall Street movement. On the eventual fallout between Adbusters and the Occupy movement Micah is reticent.

In Ottawa he speaks of his work with Adbusters and the e-mail that shook the
world and engendered protests in at least sixty countries, and he opines that
the success of all social movements come from a combination of an established
social network, a contagious mood, and creative tactics. He focuses mostly on
this contagious mood and in the talk, the Q&A session and his book he is enthusiastic
about the role of what he calls “spirit–the inner force that grants patience,
perseverance and resilience in the face of adversity.”[2]
Like the Luther-named leaders and most of his African-American predecessors,
White firmly believes that a spiritual element is key to the success of all
protests, and that the very act of protesting is capable of opening doors to
transcendence for its participants. The absence of this element is a major
critique of his for the Black Lives Matter movement, which to him has lost its
way by rejecting the deep spirituality of its predecessors.

An important part of White’s work are his
Four Theories of Revolution: voluntarism, which works on the premise of human
action being the only way through which lasting change can come and under which
most contemporary activists work; structuralism, which teaches the
insignificance of human intent on the creation of lasting change and instead
credits economic and natural forces for any changes; subjectivism, which
teaches that outside change comes from inward change, and; theurgism, a
somewhat mystical and largely forgotten theory which credits lasting change to
divine intervention. White believes that all four theories are needed for
effective protest, and history mostly avers. America’s Founding Fathers,
actively seeking to break out from under the British monarchy, invoked divine
will, called for human action against the perceived oppressiveness of the
monarchy, wrote magnificent works on the “American spirit,” and provoked a
British crimping of Boston’s commerce, all of which led to the American
Revolutionary War. Nearly two centuries later African-American civil rights
movement fought redlining and the Jim Crow economy, borrowed liturgical
language from Jewish and Christian canon to state the case for equal rights,
marched in the streets, and leveraged whatever economic power they had to see
that they and their descendants were guaranteed equal treatment by the US
government.

White also sees the current forms of protest
as largely corrupted by the media and contemporary activists who prefer online rants
to actual grunt work. He derides the degradation of protest into performance
art, an inevitable occurrence given the way such protests are covered by media
conglomerates as expressions of mostly-youthful belligerence, often with
insidious racial, religious and ideological undertones. Conversely, he
criticizes online activism as a form of narcissistic justification without, as
Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts it, “skin in the game.” He is right to put it that
way, however unpleasant it may sound. The rise of hashtag activism and
“spreading awareness” campaigns do little to confront actual, lived realities as
much as comfort the keyboard warrior that one has played a part by “supporting”
a cause, however far removed an individual’s immediate reality actually is from
said cause. Awareness of a given injustice is a byproduct of the work done to
right that injustice and should never be the goal nor a tool of any protest
group, he argues.

Since he considers most of contemporary
activism either too deeply rooted in certain ideologies to be pragmatic or just
plain ineffectual, White looks to the rural areas, feminist activism, and
protest-bots for the future of activism. These possible hotbeds have largely
been overlooked, he says, and he is convinced that the perceptions of bourgeois
and liberal urbanites of the rural communities as largely conservative and
racist hotbeds are misguided. Rural communities are well aware the way the wind
blows the world, he says, and because of the ineffectiveness of the urban,
liberal-leaning left it will be they who will eventually decide how the world
reacts to the winds of change. He also envisions a global female movement
fighting for women’s rights the world over as a welcome future of protest, and
he believes in the use of technological advances to further activist causes.
However, the excessive presence of a thing inevitably signals its devaluation,
and he argues that the ubiquitous nature of the Internet has served as a
double-edged sword for protest movements in these times. Protest should never
be easy, he says, admitting to being scared every time he has to protest.

The
key to understanding Micah White and his work lies at the intersection of the
mystical and the physical realities and his reasoned understanding of the
machinations of our world. While his work has shown how potent human activity can
be in creating global change he is keenly aware of a spiritual input to the
success of his work and in no unclear terms states that all protest is
fundamentally spiritual. He is loath to completely endorse one given worldview,
preferring to learn as much as he can from all and adapt as needed,
chameleon-like. But perhaps the deepest truth we can glean from White’s important
work, no less an unhappy truth, is that protest without backing power is
limited in its possibilities. An example: the global antiwar march of February
15, 2003. In an interview with Justin Campbell of the Los Angeles Review of Books, White points out the naïve assumptions
made by the protesters who assumed that large numbers of protesters
corresponded to increased influence over President Bush’s decisions[3].
The age of mass marches and public protest as the ley tools for effective
change is drawing to a close, he argues, citing the failures of the People’s
Climate March to achieve any meaningful results concerning climate change and the
more recent Black Lives Matter movement to stem the nationwide killing of young
black males in the U.S., amongst others.

It is the way of the world that the
strong mostly win, and that the perceived weak are entertainment for the
strong. But protest against injustice all humans must, remembering it is also
the way of the world that few lions can survive repeated kicks to the head from
a wildebeest’s hoof.

It was fitting, in a
way, to gather in a church and talk about miracles—even if only the
literary sort—and on Monday night, Southminster United was at
capacity with nearly 600 attendees for our illustrious novelist’s
appearance.

John Irving, without question one of the most
influential living American fiction writers, would read from his 14th
book, the freshly published Avenue
of Mysteries. In
conversation with CBC’s Adrian Harewood, Irving did not disappoint,
with a professorial air and a measured response for each question; he
addressed Ottawa with generosity and openness, inviting attendees to
step into a world of his creation, to see what mysteries and miracles
lay within.

And what a world it
is! The depth characteristic of Irving’s work lends itself to
serious discussion on such varied topics as magical realism,
marginalized characters, and the line between comedy and horror.
Harewood deftly steered the conversation, allowing Irving to “answer
in an elliptical fashion,” as the author put it, while still
directing their chat. One of the memorable moments came when
Harewood attempted to segue into talking about Irving’s reputation
for writing sex scenes. “I used to think I had a very vivid sexual
imagination before I read you,” said Harewood, prompting delighted
laughter from the audience and Irving alike.

Irving invited the
audience to peer through a door when answering questions concerning
his writing process, which he says he approaches from knowing the
ending of the story, and working his way through to it. “I need to
know what I am writing toward,” he said. But he acknowledged a
long gestation for his books once he understands the story’s
ending, a period in which “novels wait 5 to 8 years.” The reason
for this waiting: something he is avoiding writing.

“There has to
be something that has been waiting, unwritten,” he explained. He
said he asked himself, “What is in the story that really turns my
stomach?” Without that, he said there was no point in taking the
time to write the novel, because it would not have the impact on the
reader. “We are drawn to what frightens us…how perverse the
process of writing fiction is, how masochistic.”

One of the most
eye-opening moments of the evening’s discussion revolved around the
issue of gender equality. Early in the conversation, Irving revealed
that he credits his empathy and propensity for creating marginalized
characters to his mother, whose feminist ideals were radical and
pioneering.

Toward the end of the evening, Harewood delved
specifically into Irving’s reasons for writing transgender
characters such as Roberta Muldoon in The
World According to Garp
and Flor in Avenue
of Mysteries.
Harewood noted that Garp,
published in 1978, was ahead of its time in its portrayal of a
transgender character. “Thank you for noticing!” said Irving. A
lively dialogue followed, during which Irving expressed his
dissatisfaction with the sexual revolution: “You think things are
different? I don’t think so!” he responded, in reaction to being
questioned about a new miniseries production of Garp.
The material is still timely, he said, because “there are
dinosaurs among us” who still do not recognize the need for true
gender equality. The audience erupted in supportive applause.

Whether
the attendees came for the novel or the novelist, the evening was
rich with metaphor and glimpses into the miraculous. Though Irving
confesses that Avenue
of Mysteries
is a story of children at risk, he also knows that Juan Diego, the
main character and one of those children, “is in it for the real
thing” – the miracles. In describing how a childhood event can
seem to eclipse the adult life, and how that phenomenon informs his
writing, it becomes clear that Irving is casting the coming-of-age
experience as a miracle, too. Through discussion of his writing
process and peeks into what makes him tick, Irving was able to show
us the real wonder.

“That’s what fiction writers do. We take
something that’s true and we make it more true,” Irving
explained.” So he does.

It was a full house at the Centretown United Church last
Thursday evening, as crime fiction aficionados gathered to hear Ian Rankin
discuss his new novel, Even Dogs in the
Wild. The book is his twentieth (yes, you read that correctly) novel about John
Rebus, an Edinburgh police detective who Rankin says jumped into his head twenty
years ago as a fully-formed character complete with an ex-wife, teenage
daughter and cynical world view. Over the years, both Rankin and Rebus have matured
—now in his mid-sixties, Rebus has come out of retirement to solve another
crime.

The evening’s discussion was hosted by Peggy Blair, a crime
writer based in Ottawa, who has Rankin to thank for helping her get her start
as a writer. She began by telling the story of how the pair first became
acquainted; following a chance meeting in an English pub five years ago, Rankin’s
generosity led to Blair being represented by Rankin’s agent which resulted in her
subsequent debut on the Frankfurt Book Fair’s hot list. After learning about Blair’s
start in publishing, Rankin then discussed his beginnings as an author. After
graduating from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, he was supposed to be
working towards his PhD in Scottish Literature. He was planning to write his
thesis on Muriel Spark, whose book, The Prime
of Miss Jean Brodie, Rankin cites as one of his favourites. However, he
spent most of his time writing fiction instead. Though his very first novel
never saw the light of day, his second, The
Flood, was published in 1986 and was followed a year later by his first
Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses.

Rankin never planned to write a second Rebus book – he
actually intended for the character to be killed at the end of the first novel –
but when sales of his other books were dwindling, his publisher encouraged him
to bring the detective back. Rankin never imagined himself as a crime writer —he
dreamed of penning “the great Scottish novel” and was initially even surprised
to see his novels in the crime section of the bookstore. However, after
receiving an invitation from the Crime Writers’ Association to join them, he
couldn’t deny it any longer. Over the years he has received four Crime Writers’
Association Dagger Awards, including the prestigious Diamond Dagger. Rankin and
Blair discussed the concept of crime genre fiction and how literary fiction and
crime fiction do not need to be mutually exclusive. Rankin raised the point that
the popular Harry Potter series features many of the same tropes as crime and
mystery novels; an interesting comparison considering the fact that Harry
Potter also ages along with his book series, just like John Rebus.

Rankin lamented the publishing industry of twenty years ago,
before the rise of e-publishing and social media. He said that he is completely
unfamiliar with the current concept of e-publishing, it is not the world he
knows, and that if anyone were to ask him for advice on how to get started as
an author now he wouldn’t have a clue. I found these comments particularly
interesting as I completed an MA in Publishing in 2013, and a number of my
classes were focused on the digital presence of the author and how the Internet
has allowed writers to reach readers in increasingly new and different ways. I
think it is important for newer writers to curate an online presence in order
to market themselves; however, this is something Rankin need not worry about. With
many years of successful novels behind him, now the strength of his name alone sells
books around the world.

Monday night’s post-festival event at Southminster United Church was unsurprisingly a full house. Some attendees might argue the event’s appeal was extensive talk of sexbots (and the vast irony of such talk occurring in a church), but instead, all attention was on one of Canada’s foremost and most beloved authors, the inimitable Margaret Atwood. As host Alan Neal emoted more than once in the opening moments of the event, Monday’s event was certainly a welcome to the mind of Margaret Atwood, as sexbot-oriented as it may be.

Much of the evening’s discussion between Neal and Atwood focused on Atwood’s overall writing process, much to the delight of the budding writers in the crowd. More specifically, however, Atwood shared about the process by which her most recent publication, The Heart Goes Last, transformed from an online serial publication to a regular novel.

One of the questions Alan Neal asked during the course of the evening how Atwood went about finding or developing her characters for The Heart Goes Last. Her response? She doesn’t find characters sitting on a shelf somewhere; they grow out of the story that she tells. Despite what plenty of people may believe about the work of writers, Atwood intimated that her characters emerge during the process of creating a story; those characters don’t pre-exist. Certainly, new developments emerged for the characters of The Heart Goes Last when it transformed into a novel, but Atwood seems to imply that those character transformations were organic.

When asked about her writing process, Atwood shared that, once upon a time, she attempted to write in a calculated, formulaic way: this, Atwood said, was the Post-It note style. Specifically, Atwood shared that she tried this particular writing tactic in 1968 by using a series of filing cards and creating a formula of characters and sections. Colour coding was even involved, which sets my mildly obsessive-compulsive heart aglow, but those notes and codes certainly didn’t please Atwood.

After going through the aforementioned process, Atwood commented that she knew a lot about those characters, but absolutely nothing had happened. In the same vein, she shared advice that she gave to a friend writing a murder mystery: in the most Atwood-way possible, she suggested that this friend move the dead body closer to the front. Ultimately, Atwood shared that the writing process is akin to that of a rat searching for cheese in a maze: sometimes, you just have to throw it all out and start all over again.

One of my favourite moments of the evening (and one of a few times during which I laughed out loud) was Atwood’s recalling the helpful feature of the Microsoft Word of days gone by, wherein a small box would appear, commenting that “you seem to be trying to write a letter; would you like some help?” Atwood was, however, quick to clarify that this she was referring to a little, advice-giving box, and not the googly-eyed paperclip, the latter of which she strongly disliked. (After some quick research, I’ve discovered the aforementioned square and paperclip are more professionally referred to as office assistants. Go figure.)

One of the night’s most interesting pieces of information was that Atwood has attended ComicCon. In short, she was one of a few authors commissioned to compose an anthology in honour of Ray Bradbury. Sadly, before Atwood and her co-authors could present the publication to Bradbury at ComicCon, he passed away. (Atwood has a beautiful, long form piece about Bradbury in The Guardian for those who are interested.) Atwood and her fellow writers opted to show up in Bradbury’s honour at ComicCon anyway. Atwood shared further tales of comic-con, commented about receiving a Hobbit tote bag with which she would not part. Additionally, she shared about a connection with some Iranian filmmakers and her subsequent poster cameo in the recent cult film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

Torrential rain and broken
umbrellas didn't stop the excited audience from filling up the pews
in the cozy and brightly lit Centretown United Church. This was an
event that no one wanted to miss and it didn't disappoint.

The evening began with a
goose bump-inducing reading of In Flanders Fields as read by Leonard Cohen.
In the moment the recording played, every single person was connected
and held captive by the powerful words, which continue to hold profound meaning for Canadians.

Lt. -Gen. Roméo Dallaire
read a passage from In Flanders Fields: 100 Years: Writing on War, Loss and Remembrance (the anthology that all three speakers
collaborated on) and provided the audience with the unexplored and
emotional perspective of a commander who is responsible for other
people's lives. He spoke about how the poem never hit home until the
day he had to give orders to soldiers who ultimately died under his
command. "The poem wasn't a poem anymore ... it was living ...
the experience that this poem articulates is a responsibility for
Captains. It's a responsibility to prepare soldiers to be effective
and survive and a responsibility to carry the fact that those who
don't come back are because of your orders." This poignant final
sentence followed the tone set by Leonard Cohen's reading and added
depth to the poem's meaning and our understanding of it.

Then Tim Cook began with a
light-hearted anecdote about how In Flanders Fields was the only poem
he had ever memorized but he noted although the poem always mattered
to him, he had never thought about the man behind it until now. Cook
humanized John McCrae. He was no longer simply the poet or the
historical figure but "a leading young man in every sense."
He was the healer who desperately wanted to go to war, the asthmatic
who excelled in sports, and the humorous man who sang in a lunatic
asylum "where the audience is not disposed to be particularly
critical." However, he also carried the weight of the war with
him and the "torch" of his poem resonates with grieving
families who return to McCrae's words to soothe their scars and light
the way forward.

Mary Janigan approached
the poem in a different way—one that not many would think of. She
spoke of the effect In Flanders Fields had on the 1917 election.
Janigan admitted she initially, didn't see the connection until she
read the last six lines of the poem. These lines were quoted to rally
support for Sir Robert Borden who pushed for conscription.

However,
the "poem was sent into battle and the enemy was Sir Wilfrid
Laurier [who opposed conscription]." The resonance of the poem
played a huge role in how the country almost broke up, illustrating
how this poem can have many meanings across space and time.

The evening ended with a
brief Question and Answer session where Dallaire, Cook, and Janigan
spoke about the impact and meaning of World War I and why it's more
memorable than World War II: "it affects every town and city in
the country ... it's an Armageddon we can't get over that. It's the
war that shook us. It changed us, it almost tore us apart ... it's
the war we can't forget." Those final words bring us back to
the chilling reading, which started the event and remind us of its
call for remembrance and responsibility.

This evening, which was
filled with different perspectives of a beloved poem, showed the
audience that In Flanders Fields has many unexplored meanings. With
every experience and every reading, new meanings may arise (I know
I'll be reading it again with a new set of eyes). Ultimately, this
poem will continue to resonate with us.

Torrential rain and broken umbrellas didn't stop the excited audience from filling up the pews

in the cozy and brightly lit Centretown United Church. This was an event that no one wanted to

miss and it didn't disappoint.

The evening began with a goose bump-inducing reading of In Flanders Fields by Leonard Cohen.

In the moment the recording played, every single person was connected and held captive by

It’s miserable outside. The remnants of hurricane Patricia
have thoroughly drenched Ottawa. Everything feels damp, especially the
Centretown United Church. As I walk down the red-carpeted aisle looking for a seat I
realize how full it is. Most of the 12 rows of wooden pews are occupied and I
have to ask a group of people to move so I can squeeze past. I put down my
coffee and umbrella, and settle myself into the uncomfortable wooden seat. I’m
here to listen to Gwynne Dyer discuss his book Don’t Panic: ISIS, Terror and Today’s Middle Eastwith host, Adrian
Harewood from the CBC.

Harewood’s introduction includes a lengthy, laundry list of
Dyer’s credentials; Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history, a member of the order of
Canada, the list goes on. If the full house wasn’t enough of a clue, such an introduction shows that this man
knows what he is talking about and people want to hear him.

Dyer and Harewood take a seat at the front of the church; behind
them are stained glass pictures of crosses and large organ pipes that reach up to
the ceiling. The discussion begins with the title of the book: don’t panic. Harewood
questions whether it is truly reasonable for there to be no concern regarding
ISIS, but Dyer is happy to clarify: “Well if we were in Lebanon, or Jordan, or
Syria, yes panic,” extending his arms out and addressing the audience, “I mean you don’t panic!” He points out the 8,000
kilometres that separate Canada and Syria is a more than comforting barrier.

The conversation, guided by Harewood, discusses the history
of ISIS, the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East, and how the West fits into
everything. How a record of discontent between the treatment of Shias and
Sunnis, and Western influence in the Middle East helped create the monster we
know today as ISIS. It’s eye opening to see how ill prepared the West was. Entering
Iraq with thousands of soldiers, but a handful of people who could speak Arabic.
Rounding up everyone who looked suspicious, which according to Dyer was
everyone male and under 60. This tactic gave many extremists the opportunity to
network and recruit.

Dyer also discusses his support of Justin Trudeau’s stance
to pull out of Syria. That the risk of ISIS capturing a Canadian fighter and
publicizing some horrific torture over the Internet would not outweigh the
minimal impact we’re currently making.

With the closing of Dyer’s remarks, Harewood opens up the
floor to questions. Arms shoot into the air, many people eager to ask Dyer his
thoughts. It’s remarkable to see the wide variety of topics people are
interested in and how they are tied into Middle Eastern issues. The first to
receive the microphone is a man seated in the first row. He quickly states he is
more panicked now than he was before the talk, to which Dyer jovially tells him to
relax. The next girl is a young lady who’s more interested in sharing how the
Iraq war impacted her rather than asking a question. Another gentleman points
how climate change in the Gulf has furthered tensions by moving people into
urban centers and increasing unemployment. Others are concerned with the
refugee crisis. The variety of questions demonstrated the complexity of the
issue.

Stepping out into the puddle spotted sidewalk, I couldn’t
help sharing the sentiment of the man in the front row. There was no
resolution, no easy answer. I left with lots of questions and thoughts bubbling
in my mind. I also left with a copy of Don’t
Panic, I’m not entirely convinced the contents will be as persuasive
as the title, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

Watching the
man on stage, his bright eyes and engaging smile make it difficult to imagine
him as a child soldier. This image develops, however, as he recounts his
childhood in the Congo when, as a five-year-old boy, he was abducted from a
soccer field into a life of war. As I look
over the faces of the audience I am evidently not the only one spellbound by
Michel's tale. Nor could I be the only one wondering how he came to stand in
front of the packed gallery today.

Michel
Chikwanine, a charming and eloquent speaker, holds the crowd's rapt attention
while his mother and two sisters sit beaming. The focus of his talk, though, is
not on his personal tragedy, but on his inspirational message. This remarkable
positivity shines through the pages of his book Child Soldier: When Boys and Girls Are Used in
War, a beautifully illustrated graphic novel
detailing his capture and grisly initiation into a rebel militia.

With the unfolding of his story, I notice a creeping mosaic of feelings likely familiar to many westerners hearing tales of third-world plight. The first is the guilt that comes from realizing that a tragic reality I had pushed to my mind's periphery now stands before me. The next is a feeling of awe, that something so profoundly difficult could be this heroically overcome. Then comes a hot indignation that such horrors are still present today, with over 250,000 child soldiers currently spread across the world. Daunting as this picture is, the one feeling I don't experience is despair. Perhaps Michel's enthusiasm is contagious. Or maybe it's hearing about the awful trials he surmounted. Whatever the cause of my optimism, the expressions of the crowd tell me I am in good company.

In all honesty, I had envisioned a douroccasion, but almost immediately I could sense that his was not a tale of horror but a story of hope. As in his book, the fabric of Chikwanine’s speech is woven together by two equal themes: courage and knowledge. Clearly he has adopted these traits from his parents; his mother's strength emanates from the audience, his father's presence is almost palpable on the stage.

Michel's father, a human rights lawyer, made
many enemies speaking up against abuses by the corrupt Congolese government.
The young Michel, catching wind of the threats against his father, once asked
if he was afraid. His father replied that everyone dies, what matters is the
legacy we pass on to our family and to the world.

Following his father's assassination, Michel
moved with his family to Canada, seeking opportunity and safety. So improved
was his situation that Michel recalls feeling baffled listening to children
complain about their lunch food and cell phones. Today's youth can view the scale
of global problems with a helpless cynicism; the question "what can I
do?" becoming almost rhetorical. Michel's first-hand experiences gives him
a unique capability to offer an answer.

Michel proclaims what Africa needs above all
else is a restructuring of the education system. He explains that the current
model is nearly an empty vessel, with many schools still using history
textbooks written by British colonialists in the 1950s. Humanitarian aid must
be refocused away from creating a culture of dependence and towards educational
programs helping communities empower themselves.

While all human beings share an equal capacity
for courage, Michel believes that Western peoples have prospered because we are
equipped with knowledge. In particular, he points to the skills of critical
thinking and entrepreneurialism, referring to them as the West's most
desperately needed export. The aim, he says, is not to import a foreign
culture, but for Africa to complement its historical identity with 21st century
dignity. Michel believes that only through the alleviation of ignorance can we
eliminate poverty, and with it, the tragic phenomena of child soldiers.

Deeper than the scars of war are the marks left by his loving parents. Michel's book is an uplifting portrayal of his hard-won lessons. It concludes with a roadmap to the future and to the renewal of a continent. Watching Michel accept an enthusiastic applause I can't help but believe in the possibilities he described, and in the human ability to transform adversity into real world change.

“Well this is the strangest pairing!” Camilla
Gibb laughed gently. The audience at the Writers Festival event Only
Interpretations with AJ Somerset and Camilla Gibb tittered ruefully. Camilla
Gibb has written five books, each most likely featured in book clubs across the
country, mostly centering around female protagonists on an emotional journey. Her
latest, This is Happy, features Gibb
herself at the centre of an absorbing memoir about being abandoned by her wife
at eight months pregnant and rebuilding her life by gathering a makeshift
family of similarly broken people under her roof. Sarah Polley’s quotation
follows the book through review after review: “This Is Happy broke me, lifted me up, and filled me. I can't
remember the last time I read something so honest, tender, brutal and kind.” AJ
Somerset’s second book, Arms, is a spittingly angry treatise on gun culture and its
history in Canada and the United States. Judging from the lack of people with
both books to be signed at the end of the performance, there wasn’t a lot of
overlap between the readers.

Listening to Somerset, I reflected on how
marginal he is: a literary gun enthusiast who hates gun culture. Somerset is a
former gunnery instructor with the Canadian army and sports shooter who has
permanent tinnitus from the sound of his shotgun going off while trapshooting. And
yet, as a thoughtful sports journalist with left-wing values, he is enraged by
the airtight identity that is assumed along with gun ownership, “And of course
you are also assumed to hold a set of shared beliefs on any number of subjects
completely unrelated to guns – on partisan politics and government and climate
change and environmental regulations and religion and whether the war in Iraq
was a good idea – as if your gun had come with a free, bonus ideological Family
Pack.”

Somerset’s quest is not to problematize
this identity from his unique position but rather to expound upon his hatred of
gun culture with increasing frenzy. The audience was left riddled with stories
of insane opinions about gun control, easily preventable tragedies and, most
distressingly, the twisting of feminist ideology in support of female ownership
of guns. Quoting Margaret Atwood (quoting Gavin Becker): “Men are afraid that
women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Somerset
went on to describe the twisted logic that women need guns for protection from
men combined with the sexualisation of women with guns. He spat out “pictures
of perky blonds with pink-trimmed camouflage tank tops” with the distaste of
someone taking an accidental sip of rubbing alcohol. Somerset began the evening
as a pleasant, well-spoken guest and finished his lengthy reading as a
wild-eyed ideologue. Devoting such energy to, as he describes it, “gurgling
idiocy,” will do that to a person. Somerset noted that to further dialogue over
gun control we “have to stop flinging monkey shit at each other, to come down
from the treetops, and conduct ourselves like adults,” but I had the distinct
impression that he had taken us into the mud and rubbed our faces into it.

Camilla Gibb does not have the luxury of
such anger. Her enemy, if I can, is not a social force, but the person closest
to her: her wife of ten years who somewhat scandalously left her eight months
pregnant, telling her that she was no longer attracted to her. The book begins
with this catalyst, but then leaves it firmly behind, only present as Gibb’s
enduring sadness as she begins again. In her quest to rebuild her life, Gibb
picks up people who are equally broken, drawn (I imagine) to her steadfast
progress, step after labouring step, towards the home and family she wanted to
have. The story is heartbreaking in its simplicity. Gibb holds up her
experience as if in the palm of her hand, unornamented by judgement, blame, or
literary pyrotechnics. She noted, “I was like a train driving at a wall. There
was no poetry. Sometimes you search endlessly for the right metaphor, and then
you can just use the word. It surprised me how simple it could be.”

Gibb’s quiet, grounded
openness left a huge space for the audience to feel close to her. She chatted conspiratorially
about the people who figure in the book who contacted her afterwards, revealing,
as if to a close friend, that her ex-boyfriend’s father had texted her
recently. She answered each question with simple warmth, prising off the
awkwardness around overly-enthusiastic questions to reveal the simple exchange
at their heart. I wondered how much therapy she had to go through to be able to
face clumsy audiences with such generosity. For her short reading, she
recounted a harrowing childhood experience with her mentally unstable father
and reflected, “You know, I wasn’t sure how we were going to make a link. But
then I realized…” she flashed the room audience a brilliant smile, “my story
has a gun in it, too!”

The ARC Poetry Spoken Word Celebration
launched the magazine’s special issue bringing spoken word to print, and it was
clear in the words delivered that this was a labor of love. If writing a book
is like birthing a baby, the launch must be that moment when the baby crowns
and bursts forth with its own voice raised. That sense of expectancy, the hush
in the room, the excitement of beginning, the rhythm of breath, that was the
feel of the night at Maxwell’s on Elgin.

The drama was in four acts, led by poets
Kevin Matthews, Cat Kidd, Ian Keteku, and Tanya Evanson, who also guest edited
the issue, and hosted by Rhonda Douglas of ARC Poetry. For those who know
spoken word poetry, it will come as no surprise that some poems were political
and dramatic in their delivery, seeking to promote change in the hearts of
their listeners. These presented varied narratives, from Cat Kidd’s Hyena Subpoena, a raging meditation on
the misunderstood and villainized, to Ian Keteku’s rant at the members of the
Westboro Baptist Church. Between all the charged ideas and the stories, though,
an undercurrent pulsed. Though spoken word poets deliver performances that can
seem fringe, with polarizing content, the truth is they seek meaning through
the fleeting connections between their words and the audience. Many of the
poems performed were as universal in theme as any art: life and death, love and
loss, beginnings and endings, and dreams of a new world. This was a night about
the rhythm of existence, and the meaning we find in it, fitting for the commemoration
of printing work that normally is only expressed ephemerally. But it was fun,
thanks to the personalities and variety of techniques employed by the poets. These
four are very comfortable in their medium and the audience was set at ease; yet
their mastery of words and sound kept us on the edge of our seats, alternately
laughing and rapt with attention, eager to hear what would come next.

Kevin Matthews opened the evening with a poem
about poetry, a masterpiece of breath and voice that resonated with those in
the crowd to immediately open the evening to the right tone. The room was
accepting, receiving the words and giving back laughter, applause, murmurs of
agreement—this is why a spoken word poem is performed and not in print. His
rhythmic the love song of Roy G Biv playfully
opened the way for the rest of the night’s poetry. When Cat Kidd delivered her
vulnerable Sea Peach, which examines
the stripping down of fears necessary to let love win in your life, it was
moving and profound. She travelled all over the space, using music and almost
singing at times while using props and movement to accentuate the cadence of
the lines. Ian Keteku burst out third, throwing his entertaining and scathing
poems out first, but he changed pace before he left to deliver some slow and low
thoughts on mortality in his poem Chalk.
The room held its breath while Keteku spoke instructions for his body after
death: give it to the ocean and let plankton feed on it, and when they turn to
limestone, use the limestone that was my body to write my name for my children,
and teach them that writing was my life’s meaning. It was a stilling moment.

The pause was followed by Tanya Evanson,
whose status as the guest editor of ARC Poetry’s Spoken Word Issue made her the
lady of the hour. She strode up with dignity and spoke with a presence seen in
orators, but with expression marking her voice as her own. She spoke poems
about her father, incorporating idiomatic snippets of dialogue and rhythm to
underscore the diction. Her final poem of the evening, ostensibly about
garbage, delved back into thoughts of mortality and the evanescence of human
life. It is a preoccupation of these poets whose work lives only while they do,
but what they do with the subject matter is not depressing; to a one, the poets
bring us back to the moment of creation and show us that it is for that
creation we have come, and for it we will celebrate. There is something quite
beautiful in pausing to observe that which cannot last, because our lives and
our memories are made up of these mere transient moments. “Happy full moon,”
said Tanya Evanson, and the room cheered, “Happy hunter’s moon,” and everyone
erupted. So it was—a night of celebration, and since ARC Poetry has promised an
ongoing commitment to continue to feature spoken word, there will perhaps be
more birthdays to come.